Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

And he began to doubt, freshly, as he often did, whether he possessed the so-called Wonderments or not. It was easy to believe that Drystan had got them. “If I’d really got them,” he ruminated, “I wouldn’t have ended up a sot who can’t put down the bottle, would I?”

“Is that yow, trying to gab?” he asked the otters. “Or just my brain, like Baj says?”

It was right before a feeding, so they were frisky. One of the otters, a big female, as if responding to his query, regarded Cuthbert specially, standing still while another female and her whelps smashed up against her. The big female was in a delicate state of “almost pregnancy,” filled with implanted sperm. Embryos would begin to gestate in a month or two. Meanwhile, the whelps kept trying to bite the other mother’s neck. They wanted to nurse.

The otter habitat seemed too small, Cuthbert thought. It seemed little more than a couple of store-bought aquaria set into a mortar-and-rock faux riverbank. The otters’ hair was a rich sludge color, yet iridescent, too, smoothed back by the force of a thousand dives, with light sloping off at all angles. Cuthbert had only seen such a fascinating creature once before. The female was like all the muddy moisture of England gathered into one supermuscular cat shape. She was a Sufi creature, he thought to himself, reaching back to his cannabis and acid-addled days of bad dabbling in sophomoric esoterica which began years ago at university. Neither wholly of earth nor of water, neither entirely real nor imagined, the otter occupied an eerie in-betweenness, one of the Sufi dimensions between the Absolute of the Absolute and Cuthbert’s ugly life.

“’Ello, muckers,” he had said. “Am I safe now, am I? Do you remember me? From back in the owd days? With Drystan and what?”

He felt a sudden stab of longing for Drystan.

“Are one of you Drystan? Are you?”

No spoken word, per se, emanated from them, but Cuthbert was emotionally and mentally overwhelmed with a sense of being singled out for otterspaeke. He still felt unsure if it was the Wonderments at work, but he felt Drystan’s minty presence.

“Dryst,” he whispered. “Please.”

His rare bout of semisobriety had intensified the experience tenfold, too. He looked into the big female otter’s eyes, colored as brown-black as a river bottom. A craving seemed to concentrate in her. Or was it his craving? Who could know? There was, in any case, a desperate need in her dark eyes, from which these words emerged:

Gagoga gagoga gagoga

Miltsung miltsung miltsung

Any passing observer on the zoo’s path would have noticed little more than a fat-tummied ogler of otters hunched over the display’s barricade. But inside Cuthbert the worlds of nature, history, supernature, and memory had all burst and commingled.

The female otter rose upon her haunches, leaned forward toward Cuthbert, and took in the grassy-oily-boozy human scent emanating from him.

Miltsung, she said, in a squeaky mewl, then gagoga, gagoga, gagoga.

Cuthbert didn’t know what gagoga gagoga gagoga was, but it was not Flōt and it wasn’t the Whittington and it wasn’t even the words of Dr. Bajwa; it was something new, he was sure, a guttural alphabet gurgling in his head like water off rocks. It sounded risky, too, and it sounded urgent. Above all, it sounded like “Let us out!”

And it seemed weirdly familiar to him, too, an incantation from long ago. He wondered if his vanished brother would have understood their meaning, or if he and his loss and his return were their meaning.

Gagoga!

Cuthbert often recalled the blue veins faintly visible on his brother’s pale neck as a child, like tiny unborn rivers, dormant and perfect. He was a beautiful boy, and his loss was ugly and palpable — it roiled Cuthbert’s abdomen, and over his lifetime, it had grown harder and sicker and larger, not unlike his dying liver. Lately, when he cast around his mind for more memories of the boy, he felt increasingly blank, and the unborn rivers ran dry. And yet, as he stood, leaning against the diatom-stained glass barrier, before this once most English of English beasts, there was a sure sense to him of Drystan’s presence. Somewhere in the otters’ dark, slick hearts, in their round tomcat heads, in their webbed claws, as a poet once wrote, “of neither water nor land,” a kind of redemption lived.

There was a tap on Cuthbert’s shoulder. As soon as he saw the scarlet from the corner of his eye, he knew he faced unspeakable danger.

“You don’t look well, Indigent,” said the Watchman coarsely, and with the usual snide undertone. He had a boxy jaw and eyes like dull blue pellets. He wore one of the less bulky mantles of the Watch, red and embroidered with gold orphreys, all with a large eye in their centers. The Eye3 devices belonged to a class of biotech barred from Indigent use. These optical devices — and several dozen glared from every Watchman’s cloak — possessed the red-rimmed sclera of hound eyes. They roved. They accused. They rolled with a dim quasi intelligence. Crowded onto Watchmen cloaks, they created a grotesque effect, like draperies jeweled with eyeballs, and, along the trademark golden neuralwave pike the Watch all carried, the effect terrified the powerless.

“You paid?” the Watchman demanded.

“Ar, sir,” said Cuthbert. “I did.” He wasn’t as high as usual on Flōt, but he wasn’t sober either; the slight buzz let him speak with a touch of composure. He still possessed the illusory proprioception of long legs as well as the self-satisfaction typical of a Flōt high. But the Red Watch were trained to watch for Ingall’s Sign, the slight stooping forward and loping gait that Flōt normally caused in longtime addicts.

“Have you noticed there aren’t Indigents here? This is a place for quality families. That’s what the king wants.” The Watchman ran his hand up and down his pike. “I think it’s time you went home.”

“But, sir, I paid. It’s a medical issue. My doctor’s sent me here. A’m a loyal subject.”

The Watchman frowned at him, nodding. “You leaning forward, mate?”

“I’m just tall,” said Cuthbert.

“Yeah, tall. That’s a coopy *way of putting it.” Then he smiled acidly. “Oh, I’m sorry, a medical problem, is it? You need a hood? Shall I put a call into the P-levs?”

“That’s not right,” said Cuthbert. “I hear animals. You ought not! That’s not —” Before he could get it out, the Watchman tapped him with his pike. His knees buckled and he dropped like a sack of onions. Cuthbert sat on the ground, an old man stunned, rubbing his fat temples and trying to get his bearings.

“Are you thick as pig shit?” asked the Watchman, speaking in a hushed voice. “Get the fuck up and go wash back down the urinal you crawled from. You’ve no idea how miserable I could make your life, you badger’s arse. Want to spend your golden years wanking in a Calm House? You one of them cultists?”

The Watch was recruited from other Indigents, and notoriously sadistic, and Watchmen acted with special pitilessness toward other Indigents. Cuthbert was in real danger, and he knew it now. It was not uncommon to hear stories of Indigents neuralpiked to death, especially if they were accused cultists or high on Flōt.

A small crowd, mostly milky-skinned women with small children in strollers, had gathered. They glared at Cuthbert with curiosity and contempt. There were no Indigents among them, from what Cuthbert saw.

“Leave him alone,” a younger woman with a long lilac skirt said to the Watchman. “He’s just a poor old man who eats too many biscuits. He’s allowed at the zoo.”

The Watchman quietly made a sheeh sound, snorting a little. “Just keeping the zoo safe, ma’am. This man was, erm, loitering. It’s a tactic I associate with that Heaven’s Gate lot. Or ’e’s a dangerous Flōt addict.”